“Wonderful” [ft. The Weeknd]

Between his amorphous, epic studio debut Rodeo and his collaborations with Kanye West and Rihanna, it's safe to mark 2015 as Travi$ Scott's biggest year to date. And with "Antidote" holding steady on the Billboard charts, the punkish Houston performer looks poised to continue that momentum into the new year. Now, with "Wonderful"—a new collaboration with the Weeknd that Scott dropped at the end of December—he's released one of his most cohesive statements to date, a chilly club track festooned with all the spacey flourishes we’ve come to expect from the man known as La Flame.

T-Minus and Boi-1da's crystalline beat isn’t exactly new: it appeared on Tinashe's "In the Meantime", which was cut from her debut LP Aquarius, a quiet-storm slow-burner about weekday booty-calls. Nevertheless, the clattering drums and two-note bounce rhythm fit in perfectly with Scott’s abrasive aesthetic. Scott and producer Mike Dean lend upgrades to the track: namely, the live drum sample midway through that gives the track a momentum boost.

The Weeknd is a late addition to "Wonderful", and not an especially memorable one. (Scott has been performing the song while opening for Abel Tesfaye on tour.) Given Tesfaye’s massive success last year and his close proximity to Scott, it’s easy to see why he’d pop up, but "Wonderful" succeeds on the merits of its strong production, the creative use of pitch-shifted, chime-like ad-libs, and Scott's charmingly confrontational rhymes.